The Short-Leg Watch: James Taylor's Two Catches That Were More Than Catches

The ball left Stuart Broad's hand that morning in Johannesburg's Bullring and kissed the inside edge of Hashim Amla's bat before jumping toward short leg. James Taylor took 0.4 seconds to hold it. That is the number no broadcaster put on the screen after the match, and it is the number that changed the session. Within that same half hour Taylor took a second catch — Dane Vilas's, the one that needed a dive. Two catches, thirty minutes, and a position cricket forgets about until someone gets hurt there.

I have watched short leg since the sixties as a place, not a player. In my early years on the desk I never opened a match report with the toss; I started with the nets, the queue at Gate 2, the man who sits at the back of the team bus. Short leg works the same way. In the frame the position is only a smudge — a man a few paces from the batter. But sessions are shaped by that smudge. In Test cricket the position spins for five days, the ball is hard, the pitch has bounce, and captains deliberately put a man there to build pressure. Outside Tests the spot is nearly empty — nobody posts a short leg in the death overs of a T20. The skill we are discussing is a red-ball skill.

Three things come together in Taylor's story, and that is what makes it different. The body first — 5ft 6in, called 'Titch' in the dressing room. A lower centre of gravity means a faster low grab. Then the choice — he demanded the position himself, even as school captain. This is where an old error in my notebook breaks: 'Put the smallest player at short leg.' Players who field it badly avoid the spot, or are shamed into avoiding it. Taylor chose the position the way you choose a promotion, not a punishment.

Third, his preparation. England fielding coach Paul Farbrace put a different kind of drill in front of him — a boxer's sparring pad. Someone would flick high-speed balls at his toes and Taylor had to deflect them. Cricket's reaction training usually runs off a catching cradle; this drill was different because it built reaction overload at speed, the way a boxer trains his eyes and hands in the ring. I have sat on buses with fielding coaches for years; this was the first time I saw a staff treat close-catching as a separate skill and train it separately.

Now the point where Taylor's technical understanding collides with cricket's sense of beauty. Asked which catch was better, he picked Amla's — faster, lower, technically cleaner. The diving Vilas catch looks beautiful; for Taylor it was the easier of the two, because the dive bought him a fraction of time. I keep wanting to write this into the copy: spectacle and difficulty are different things, and a fielder should be judged by his reaction window, not his dives. Broad's steep bounce on a Johannesburg pitch brings that front-foot flick to short leg — a deliberately built channel, not an accident.

And here I remember a decision of mine that did not fail me but has left me uneasy. Dane Vilas said in the dressing room that he had played that shot a thousand times and scored from it 999 times. The dismissal was an outlier — that wicket should be read as a low-probability execution event, not a permanent tactical edge for Taylor. For years I built the story out of the scorebook: the catches turned the session. The truth is that two catches in half an hour can turn a session — that happens in Tests. But the scorecard, the innings context, the margin of victory — none of it is in that feature. My notebook still says: 'He who won, won because of these catches' — left to the writer's will. It is the easiest trick in journalism, and the most expensive.

Then comes the moment every short-leg story must meet. In the same period I was sitting on a bus, Taylor had retired at 26 — not from fielding, but from an incurable heart condition. I want to make that distinction myself, because the injury stories around short leg have blurred it: the risk of the field and the risk of the body are not the same risk. Short leg is genuinely cricket's most dangerous fielding position — the ball arrives within a few paces of the batter, on the sweep and pull line. But that danger is treated with helmets, padding and practice. Taylor's heart condition had no such treatment. Conflating the two muddles both the safety debate and a man's story.

My doubt about short leg's future is different. Between the shrinking red-ball calendar and the expansion of white-ball cricket, this skill survives mainly in Test captains' pockets. Whether academies will teach close-catching with a sparring pad, I don't know. But I do know Taylor gave cricket-knowledge a valuable lesson by choosing the Amla catch — applause goes to the dive; craft lives in catching fast and low. Next time you see a man posted at short leg, do not assume the weakest player was sent there. He is probably the quickest responder, and someone let him choose to stand there.